Chariots of Iron

Episode 16 is in the can and will be posted shortly. I know I’ve been pretty quiet with the blog posts recently, but I chalk this up the the weather and the holidays. Now that it’s officially 2009 and the family isn’t calling on a near-daily basis I can turn back to wasting the time of complete strangers.

After recording this past weekend Bo and Luke were discussing how they’d like to spend a bit more time on the show ripping apart religious arguments. As I’m all for this I thought I’d jump the gun a bit and post here soliciting arguments from our readers and listeners. So if you’ve heard/read or have your own arguments please post a link to or the full text of the argument you’d like to hear us shred to this post, or alternately you can email it to us (if you listen to the show, you know the address), or even post it over on our group at Atheist Nexus (where this message will be cross-posted).

Hopefully, with the combination of our listeners and the google-fu of the Charioteers, we will have enough inanity to fill years worth of shows in the span of a couple months. We will of course choose the more recent and novel arguments above the old and tired ones.

As we talked about in the last podcast Australian students in religious education classes are going to be given some education about Humanism and it will be pointed out that “there is no evidence for god. Of course Ken Ham has a bit of a reading comprehension problem, and this explains a lot about Mr. Ham, in his recent blog post he claims that Australian Students are to be taught “there is no god”.

Allow me to be the first to point out that “there is no evidence for” and “there is no” are two distinctly different statements. It is further into Mr. Ham’s inanity that I take a certain level of umbrage, he claims that “religious education” is the place for this discussion because “atheism is a religion”.

This old one again, and frankly one I’m a bit sick of. Atheism, is specifically the absence of religion, in the way that “darkness” is not in itself a “thing” but merely the absence of light, so is atheism an absence of religion. Humanism could be thought of as a religion in some ways, however a more proper definition would be that Humanism is a philosophy as most religions deal with supernatural claims and are most marked by some form of worship, and philosophies are not.

Of course where atheism and religion cross is when secularists point out that freedom of religion, in order to be truly a “freedom” must include freedom from religion. If I told you that your “freedom of being punched” meant you got to choose wether I punched you in the face or in the gut, I do not believe you’d think very highly of such a “freedom”.

Over on my favorite blog (well besides my own) PZ Myers was kind enough to post some hate-mail he’d received over the recent Zoo/Creation museum controversy.  While Professor Myers does not respond to these directly, there was one comment I wanted to call out, and decided, since I’ve been lazy this week, that I’d do so here, as it is representative of a common claim from fundamentalist religious types.

Scientist thought the universe revolved around the earth about 1000 years ago,they thought the earth was flat 500 years ago and 200 years ago man couldn’t fly so as we progress we find science is very fallible.

What the author of this statement fails to realize is that the above three statements were believed by early “scientists” because the religious institutions at the head of most civilizations said that these things were so.  I also think the authors dates were a bit off… but all three are examples of dogmatic truth overthrown by scientific inquiry. While it is true that as more data is collected by scientists theories are revised, overthrown and corrected. But that is the strength of science not it’s weakness. The ones holding onto outdated beliefs are the religiously faithful. Here they chide scientists for being wrong in the past centuries yet somehow holding onto beliefs over 2000 years old is “correct”.

News flash, you were wrong 200 years ago, get over it, while scientists may have been wrong in the past, they’ve at least the intellectual honesty to change thier beliefs in concert with the facts rather than railing against the facts in order to hold onto thier beliefs (although there have been individual sceintists who have held onto overthrown theories, this is speaking of the scientific community in general, not individual scientists). Let’s also add that scientific methods and the introduction of peer-review and widely distributed (at least amongst the professionals) scientific journals have added much to the accuracy of the scientific method, no longer are authorities allowed to dismiss arguments when evidence is presented that all can see and experiments are easily replicated and predictions confirmed. The internet has made this process more efficient but has also caused some data to get out to the general public before the peer-review process is complete, hence my common detraction of popular science websites in favor of established scientifc journals.

In an article over on sciam, researchers have found that meteor-like impacts can also catalyze the formation of life’s chemical precursors.This could be in contradiction or in complement to asteroids and comets being the delivery vehicle for such molecules.

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In a great example of how science corrects its own errors is this recent article in the New York Times showing that recent studies indicate that the early earth may have been more hospitable to life than originally thought. It’s a clear example of how, when backed by evidence long-held scientific “truths” can be overturned when one follows the proper process of evidence, study and review.

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Over on Panda’s Thumb they’ve got a great little write up on a Triassic fossil found in china. It is that of  Odontochelys, a clear mid-point between turtles and reptiles. The thing has reptile-like teeth and broad flat ribs as well as belly armor, but no shell on it’s back. Not quite a crocoduck, but a “lizurtle” (turtizard?, oh I like that, sounds like a pokemon… tutrizard! I choose you!) to be sure. I’ll be having Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron eating their hats now please.

Oh, this one’s originally posed by PZ Myers, so I’m sure you’ll find they information on pharyngula as well.

There is a nother nice write-up on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Bill Donohue is at is again, over on the Catholic legue website is this little gem. It’s Donohue railing against the appointment of Melody Barnes as the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.  My favorite quote from the blurb is the following:

“A few years ago, when pro-life Catholic and evangelical judges were being summarily denied the right to serve on the federal bench, Barnes denied that bigotry was at play. To top it off, when asked to name people who are both pro-abortion and religious, she offered as proof the notoriously anti-Catholic group, Catholics for a Free Choice. Looks like Obama has chosen a ringer.”

Co the CFFC is now “anti-catholic”, sorry folks, Jews for Jesus is anti-jew, but the CFFC is definitley not “anti-catholic” in any way, the differ from the papal dictates on abortion and birth control. Appaerntly when a Catholic organaization admits that the reality of our modern world makes certain dogmatic declarations to be the inverse of just plain common sense then they’re stuffed into the same category as the KKK (now there’s an orgnization that can truly be called “anti-catholic”!) or the Penecostal “the catholic church is an apostate church” Faith. Sorry Billy-boy I just ain’t buying it. As a matter of fact I don’t buy any Abrahamic religious argments against abortion or birth-control. I am aghast that religious fundamentalists refer to a book that has been used to both support and condemn racism, slavery and the abuse of both women and children for any setting of public policy.

A very depressing story form South Africa came to my attention this morning. Apprently former South African president Thabo Mbeki and his administration had adopted a fringe belief that AIDS is not caused by a virus. South Africa’s AIDs epidemic is one of the largest in the globe, but to deny that this disease not caused by an infection of some sort (and thus denying it’s communicability) is literally a death sentence for those under his administration.

The stance by Mbeki’s administration caused them to turn down free drugs and grants to help deal with the problem. Ignorance of science is by no means isolated to those with strong religious convictions, but such beliefs as held by the Mbeki administration do require similar leaps of logic.

You will hear me say this a lot in the blog, but religious belief is just another species of a much bigger problem and that is one of ideology over reality.

Apparently Ann Coulter’s Jaw has been wired shut.

Anyway to make this a permanent condition?

I found this interesting link over on Intelligent Design The Future, it’s a further link to an Amazon page for the book “Billions of Missing Links”. It is billed as a rational look at the mysteries science cannot explain, however I would never use the word “cannot” how about “has yet to explain”, this would be an accurate, however less sensationalist description.

It’s true science has yet to explain everything, and each discovery in turn raises more questions, this is how knowledge advances. The book essentially complains that each fossil we find creates more “missing links” it is apparent that the Intelligent Design crowd will never be satisfied unless every living thing on this earth has fossilized and we’ve uncovered all these non-existent fossils. They’ve completely bypassed any version of “reasonable” evidence and will use even the tiniest gap to shoehorn their views in. This is the “god of the gaps” argument taken to an irrational extreme.

The fact is that every fossil is transitional, evolution doesn’t stop (although evidence does show that it may slow down for periods of time), and every species is on it’s way to becoming an entirely new species guided by the forces of natural selection.

To take a quote from the post,  “Every “link” discovered brings many more questions (missing links) than answers”. Of course it does! This is how science works, each discovery leads to more questions which leads to more discoveries. This isn’t lik escripture where you write it down, close the book and it’s done. Knowledge is continously being uncovered, questions being answered which lead to new and better questions. If a discovery ended all questions than science would grind to a halt. We’d know all we could ever possibly want to know about the universe. Of course this is what the ID movement and it’s theist backers want. They want science to come to a halt, as we’ve entered a dawn of discovery that has already squeezed thier bronze-age myths into irrelevance.